The narrative around George FitzGerald’s 2015 debut Fading Love described a dance-music insider turning his back on the form. It had all the makings of a “Judas!” moment. The UK producer had gone from club-centric labels (Scuba’s Hotflush, Will Saul’s Aus) to an imprint of Domino, a fixture of the indie establishment. He’d softened his sound and traded breakdowns and build-ups for more songlike arrangements. He even admitted to Resident Advisor that he was tired of club culture and the DJ life.
But if any fans did gripe about FitzGerald selling out, that would have been some truly narcissism-of-small-differences kvetching, because really, the album barely broke from his earlier work. His earliest productions leavened peak-time club fare with pastel colors and pneumatic volume, and as Fading Love moved away from the dancefloor, it doubled down on super-saturated chord stabs, wordless vocal loops, and other emotive tropes, painting a wall-to-wall picture of wistfulness. The tempos tended to be slower than before, and the track lengths shorter, without the DJ-friendly intros and outros of a 12" release. But in sound and mood, the album slotted comfortably into a long tradition of dance music made for home stereos, borrowing bits from Moderat, Jon Hopkins, Four Tet, and innumerable other artists whose reach stretches from the club to the sofa and back.
It was a canny strategy: Four of the album’s 10 songs have each racked up more than a million plays on Spotify, and “Full Circle,” the album’s melancholy highlight, has more than 12 million plays—the kind of number that’s nearly unthinkable for an artist coming from his corner of the dance scene. So you can hardly blame him for sticking with that direction on All That Must Be, his second album, in which overflows with yearning. If anything, the new record inches ever so slightly back toward the dancefloor: its beats lie within house music’s typical tempo range, he’s stretched out his track lengths a bit, and the basslines feel more forceful, as though FitzGerald were writing in anticipation of how his tracks will sound on club sound systems.
FitzGerald has often built his music around the snippets of voice that became ubiquitous right around the time of UK bass producer Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo,” and on the last album, he began working with actual singers; two tracks on the new album—“Roll Back,” featuring the dovelike falsetto of the UK funky musician Lil Silva, and “Half-Life (Night Version),” with Everything But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn—are the closest things to “proper” songs that he’s ever written. Even when he’s not working with singers, he tends to tie on wordless vocal strips as though they were satin ribbons, a technique that helps infuse his music with warmth. The choppy vowels of both “Burns” and “The Echo Forgets” sound directly descended from the hiccupping through-line of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.”
But FitzGerald hasn’t quite figured out how to get the best out of his singers yet. Thorn has one of the most distinctive voices in the business, yet on “Half-Life,” he pours on sticky-sweet synths until it sounds like she’s drowning in a honey whirlpool. And while he may nod toward song form, FitzGerald doesn’t really do verse/chorus structures: Just like his club tracks, his songs here are created by adding and subtracting layers around a beat and a bassline. That repetitive focus may lend a certain hypnotic power—in the best tracks, you feel like you’re traveling through a long, neon-lit tunnel—but it also means there are few melodic or harmonic surprises. In track after track, cycling chords encircle wistful ostinato leads, shifting between tension and release as predictably as the tide.
All That Must Be feels more cohesive than his debut, but its songs also tend to blur together. The opening “Two Moons Under” and then “Frieda,” which follows, are in complementary keys, paced at nearly the same tempo, and share virtually identical elements, which continue to turn up in track after track: rumbling bass synths, muted pads, and swirls of arpeggio, all held together by those rose-tinted wisps of breath. Taking a cue from Boards of Canada, the synths are constantly slipping out of tune, as though they’d been recorded on a haywire tape recorder. But instead of conferring character, the omnipresent warble ends up sounding forced, like an Instagram feed over-reliant on filters that mimic vintage film cameras.
It all adds up to a mood that can be frustratingly one-note. All that wistfulness feels like something pasted on, rather than something earned. FitzGerald would be the first to admit that his tastes gravitate toward melancholy: One of his early tracks was titled “Fernweh,” a hard-to-translate German word that denotes the longing for far-off places. But All That Must Be doesn’t quite live up to its own heartstring-tugging goals; too often, it’s just kind of comfortably glum.
